Author's Craft for Writing

Wow, yesterday I was as busy as a bee.  I went to bed and slept like a log.  My bed called to me!

In case those first 3 sentences didn't obnoxiously give away the focus of this post, I'm going to talk about author's craft...specifically - Figurative Language and Golden Bricks.  Both are techniques I use to teach my students how to breath life into their writing.

As we worked through the various techniques, I have students practice them in isolation, and then work on incorporating them in their various writing activities, such as free writes, paragraphs, essays, memoirs, etc.

I also have them look at completed writing assignments and use highlighters or colored pencils to show where they have used them (or where their writing is lacking these techniques).

By this point in the year, my students have become accustomed to using these tricks of the trade seamlessly in their writing, but sometimes need reminders to include them in order to break up their detail sentences.  To help with this, and to serve as a resource, I created notebook pages for them to keep in their writing journals (see below).

If you're interested in this mini-poster set + notebook pages, please visit my TPT store (link is on the right side of my blog).  This set is free! It includes 12 mini posters + 2 notebook pages.  The posters and pages are color coded to highlight the difference between figurative language and golden bricks.

Enjoy!